Join call for axeing limits on abortion’
...and who’s advising them? This senior executive of UK’s biggest provider of terminations
decriminalisation of abortion’ as an ‘operational priority’ for 2018.
In February, it asked its members whether or not they approved of decriminalisation in an online survey which has just closed.
When the survey opened, Ms Myers gleefully tweeted: ‘Great news – the Royal College of Nursing asks all members to vote on the decriminalisation of abortion.’
She appears to have little time for those with opposing views, however. Last Thursday, she re-tweeted a message describing a House of Lords Bill, which seeks to clarify the extent to which health workers can object to participating in abortions, as ‘the obnoxious Conscientious Objection Bill’. And in January, she re-tweeted a message that described the appointment of Maria Caulfield as the Conservatives’ vice chair for women as ‘absolutely inappropriate’ because the MP ‘opposes decriminalisation of abortion’.
Last year, a ComRes survey of more than 2,000 people found twothirds of those interviewed wanted the time limit on abortion lowered from 24 to 20 weeks. Only 1 per cent backed scrapping time limits on abortion according to the survey, commissioned by pro-life group Where Do They Stand?
The RCN insists it has not yet drawn up a new position on abortion. Last night a spokesman said: ‘The college is committed to having a position on decriminalisation and every member has been given the opportunity of informing that position. Next steps will be announced in due course.’
But anti-abortion nurses fear the new policy is a done-deal – and believe the survey is little more than a fig-leaf consultation.
More than 370 RCN members have written to chief executive Janet Davies, protesting: ‘This move is being promoted by a small group of campaigners with extreme views on abortion.
‘Whilst they are entitled to hold the convictions they do, we must not let them impose their agenda on the RCN and risk severely damaging its reputation.’
The ‘Not In My Name’ antiabortionists – they have adopted the motto used by rebel midwives on the same issue – said that while RCN members were being consulted, they were being given no say on the ‘specific wording of the final positioning statement’.
Former Conservative Minister Sir Julian Brazier said: ‘The RCN is a great institution and the effect of a vote of this kind would be to abandon its long history of caring for the innocent and vulnerable.’
The RCN declined to comment on Not In My Name or Ms Myers’s involvement.
However, Ann Furedi, chief executive of BPAS, claimed it was fanciful to suppose BPAS could swing opinion at the Royal colleges.